The big dreaded EIP has landed, you have had time to play with it. Granted it is still a bit new and will take a month or more for rewards to stabilize. As behaviors change, will take even longer for rewards to stabilize again. The EIP is a long term change and not something that will result in an immediate turn-around.

That being said, I know a lot of people were against the changes.

Have you changed your mind?

Do you still hate the EIP?

Free Downvotes

One of the most notable changes is the increased in downvoting. Trending looks totally different today than it did 7 days ago. Posts are trending organically and with far fewer rewards than a week ago. Many of the posts on trending are not the result of bid bots.

Have you downvoted spam and abuse since HF21?

Will you?

I know a lot of people don't feel comfortable with downvotes, giving or receiving. Without downvotes, we would have what is happening on Whaleshares.

Users have given up and are making posts called Account Preservation Posts where the sole purpose is to extract as much value from their stake for themselves as possible. No one can challenge them or do anything about it. Because they are no longer allowing downvotes.

Downvotes allow the community to use their full influence to decide what should be on trending, what shouldn't be, and what deserves rewards.

That is your right as a stakeholder!

That is also your responsibility. If you don't execute your ability to downvote content that is over rewarded, stolen, low or no effort, and just bad then those tokens are lost and will never get in the hands of those who deserve them. Every token that goes to shit content is a token that will never make it into the hands of a good content producer.

50/50 Curation

50/50 rewards is a key part of the EIP, it gives stakeholders a more rewarding and fair avenue to assist in the distribution of rewards while making the gap between pure selfishness and engaging in distribution much smaller. When a curator would make around 8 cents for every $1 vote it was extremely difficult to not take advantage of the other options like self voting (75-100 cents per $1 vote) and bid bot delegation (45-85 cents per $1). The gap was just too big and made greed nearly unavoidable.

Finally, the curve

A lot of people still don't fully understand the curve as it is really complicated and has been poorly explained. Many users believe their vote has gone down as much as 40-50% as the result of the curve.

Your vote has not changed at all!

I'm serious, when you vote you assign x amount of rshares to a post (or comment) based on your steem power, voting power, and weight of the vote. That hasn't changed in HF21 (also HF22).

What has changed is how much a post (or comment) is worth with x amount of rshares. When the amount of rshares on a post is low (under 1 steem), they yield fewer rewards. As the number of rshares increases on a post (or comment) the value of those rshares goes up. This is the same for everyone and every post.

There are two scenarios where you will see that your "vote has gone down". That is when self voting with less than a $3 vote or voting on comments (which typically don't have a lot of other votes).

While I am not upset about the first, the second does bother me. I believe comments are a big part of engagement and are the lifeblood of social media. I wish there was a solution to have the spam-prevention of the curve and the ability to reward good comments with small rewards without taking such a hit on your voting power. The truth is, the amount of spam and abuse that is discouraged by the curve is far higher than the number of rewards on comments. Spam has overtaken the platform but rewarding comments is a relatively rare action.

It is still early to see where the EIP will take us, but you can already see changes immediately. Most bid bots are idle, there is very little competition to use them, trending isn't full of $200 shit posts, users are downvoting bad content, larger stakeholders are voting more than themselves, good content producers are getting more votes (more rewards will come as we come closer to an equilibrium), there is less low reward spam, it is now possible for a user to organically hit trending.

We are nowhere near perfect, we have a lot of work to do and the EIP may need to change again to tweak the numbers closer to an ideal economy. The thing is, we are already seeing a lot of positive improvements in just a couple of days. The EIP is a long term change and will take time to really show the results, so it will likely get a lot better over time.

What do you think?

Speak up below, regardless if you support or don't support the EIP, your voice is valuable. Use it!